Françaix: Scuola di Ballo and Sérénade

Some composers spend a lifetime trying to escape themselves. Jean Françaix never bothered — he knew exactly who he was by the time he was twenty, and he stayed that way for sixty-odd years, unrepentant, unfashionable, and unfailingly delightful. That consistency has cost him critical respectability in certain quarters. It shouldn’t. There is something almost heroic about a composer who lived through Boulez, through Stockhausen, through the whole scorched-earth avant-garde, and simply kept writing tunes.

This new disc reminds us why that matters.

The Scuola di Ballo music, drawn from Françaix’s 1933 ballet on themes of Boccherini, opens the program with a wink. We’re in Diaghilev territory here, or rather its aftershock — Stravinsky had already detonated the whole idea of “authentic” old music with Pulcinella a decade earlier, and Respighi and Tommasini were busy ransacking the eighteenth century for danceable material. Françaix’s contribution is slighter than any of theirs, frankly, scored for a chamber-sized band with a kind of powdered-wig delicacy: pizzicato strings, chattering winds, the odd puckish harmonic sideslip that tells you a twentieth-century Frenchman, not an eighteenth-century Italian, is at the console. Nobody will mistake this for profound music. Nor should they try.

The Sérénade, though — that’s another matter, and I confess a private history with it. I first encountered this piece as a student, on a scratchy broadcast tape, and it planted something that never quite left. It’s Françaix’s neoclassicism at its most persuasive: transparent scoring, an unabashed sweet tooth for wind color (that oboe writing!), and a sense of proportion so exact you’d swear he’d measured it with a jeweler’s loupe. Nothing here overstays.

The disc’s real discovery, for listeners who don’t already know it, ought to be the Symphony in G major of 1953, Françaix’s homage to Haydn, worn openly on the sleeve rather than smuggled in through allusion. Four compact movements, a Minuet and Trio sitting where you’d expect. It never reads as pastiche. Françaix had studied with Nadia Boulanger, absorbed her gospel of craft and clarity, and here he applies it to a Haydnesque frame with results that are drier, wittier, occasionally sharper-edged than the old master himself. There’s a modern nervous energy under the poise, little rhythmic hiccups and harmonic sidesteps that Papa Haydn would have raised an eyebrow at, approvingly I think. Of the composer’s three symphonies, this is the one worth championing over the string-orchestra Second, whatever the received wisdom says.

Then the Ouverture anacréontique, from 1978, late Françaix, and one of his most spacious single spans. The slow introduction is gorgeous, unhurried, some of his most inspired sustained writing. It yields to a dance episode with real lift in the strings, then circles back, the coda gathering up the dance material and driving it home with unexpected brilliance. It’s the sleeper of this program.

And finally the Pavane pour un Génie vivant, written for Ravel’s fiftieth-anniversary tribute: a small, almost devotional piece whose opening phrase turns Ravel’s own Pavane pour une infante défunte upside down, quite literally, as a kind of private bow. Simple almost to a fault. But simplicity, in Françaix’s hands, was never a retreat. It was a discipline, hard-won and harder to fake.

The performances here have the right temperament: light of foot, unforced, alert to the wind writing that is so much the soul of this music. I wouldn’t claim they banish memory of older Erato and EMI accounts entirely; a touch more Gallic swagger in the Scuola di Ballo wouldn’t have hurt. Still, the engineering is clean, the balances sensible, and the whole enterprise argues its case with conviction. Recommended, unreservedly. Here’s hoping somebody puts these same forces back in the studio soon. Françaix wrote far too much good music to let it molder.